28-Year-Old is Youngest Woman to Run 100 Marathons

Nadia Ruiz reached the milestone at Sunday’s San Francisco Marathon.

With her father at her side, Nadia Ruiz ran into the Guinness Book of World Records yesterday. As the father-and-daughter team crossed the finish line of the San Francisco Marathon, Ruiz, 28, became the youngest person to run 100 marathons, snagging the title from a 34-year-old British woman, according to Guinness' records.

Ruiz was exuberant and her father, Jorge, beaming, despite both being tired from their nearly five-hour journey on the city’s hilly streets. And while the official Guinness title will list Ruiz as the “youngest runner to complete 100 marathons (female),” she refers to herself as the “youngest, fastest, Latina” to reach that benchmark. (Brit Adam Holland is reported to have reached the 100-marathon mark at age 24, but he hasn't filed the necessary paperwork with Guinness.)

“I teach at an inner city school and lots of kids think that because they come from an immigrant family or a poor family, they can’t go for such goals,” says Ruiz, a high-school biology teacher in Los Angeles. “I want to show them anything can be done no matter what their background.”

Ruiz’s parents came to the United States from Ecuador a few months before she was born. Her father, Jorge, now 55, is an electrician and her mother is a cashier at Jack in the Box. There was a time, she says, when there were four people to one mattress in their home. She credits her parent’s work ethic for building a good life for their family.

At the finish line, Ruiz says, her overriding emotion was gratitude. Completing the quest with her father was the perfect bookend to a marathoning career that began with him by her side, she says.

In 1999, Ruiz was in middle school and had just started running cross-country when she announced to her parents that she would be signing up for the Los Angeles Marathon.

Her mother thought age 14 was too young for the distance. Her father looked at her, and after a few minutes said that if his teenage daughter was going to run her first marathon, then he would participating in his first marathon, too.

Before the race, neither had run more than six miles (there was little time to train). Ruiz broke down in tears at mile 12, but her father coached her to the finish.

“He told me, ‘You can do it, you can do it,’” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t let him down.’ We took walk breaks." They finished in 4:05.

“My dad taught me the power of mental strength that day,” Ruiz says, adding that neither of them could walk without pain for two weeks.

After that first race, Ruiz ran a marathon a year for several years, learning, she says, that if you train, it hurts less.

Once she finished graduate school, Ruiz began notching five, then 7, then 10 marathons per year, hitting number 50 at age 25. At around that time, a friend finished her 100th, and Ruiz got it into her head that she would reach that milestone by age 30.

“It was an arbitrary goal,” she says. “But then I started looking to see if there was a record and came across the Guinness world record and I realized that if I ran between 15 and 20 marathons a year, I could break it way before 30.”

Ruiz had her doubts, but she channeled them into motivation. “I learn something about myself whenever I feel I can’t do something,” she says. “The negativity reminds me to have a positive attitude.”

Ruiz also noticed her running had had a ripple effect.

“The more I did, the more my family exercised,” she says. “It’s a positive feedback system. They supported me, but as I was reaching my goals, I was encouraging my family to be healthy.”

After that first race, the Ruiz family spent weekends racing 5-Ks and 10-Ks together. Ruiz and her father traded off beating each other. Today, her entire family—mom, dad, brother, sister and husband—have finished a marathon.

Ruiz counts the races she completed with her family as the most memorable. There was the first marathon with her father, then four years later, she walked the LA Marathon with her mom, dad, sister and little brother. The race took them 6:15.

Though slower than most of her races—Ruiz has run 51 of her 100 marathons in 3:35 or faster—the family’s LA race wasn’t her longest. That honor goes to the Inca Trail Marathon. Battling rain, high winds and slippery rocks, she managed slip over the finish in 10:30, a half hour before the cutoff time.

Ruiz and her father kept their pace intentionally comfortable in San Francisco on Sunday. Her father has a personal best of 3:30 and was running his 49th marathon, but prostate cancer and a car accident has kept his training to a minimum for many years.

With the record secure, Ruiz has set her sights on faster times. At this year’s LA Marathon, she clocked 3:16:05. She’s calculated that if she focuses solely on running—three of her marathons were Ironman finishes—a sub-3-hour race is within reach.

“I’ve tested my potential on what was my best for that day,” she says. “Now I want to find out what my true potential is in the marathon.”

Editor’s note: A month after finishing her 100th marathon, Ruiz learned another runner had beat her to the record. Guinness updated its website in late July, listing Marina White, 26, as the youngest runner to complete 100 marathons, female. White ran her 100th 26.2-miler at the Amica Marathon in Newport, Rhode Island on October 14, 2012.